Trivial edits to remove posts from the close queue?

Question

Background:

Recently when reviewing in the close vote queue, I came across a post that I was pretty sure I had seen some weeks prior. So after a bit of investigation I determined that I had in fact seen the post before. What I found was that the post had been removed from the close vote queue by a 1 character edit.

When reviewing in the close queue, editing a post will remove the post from the queue. This is because the post was presumably improved, and no longer needs to be closed.

Normally, multiple leave-open votes are required to remove a post from the queue. But armed with the knowledge of how the system works, it is possible to unilaterally remove the post from the queue with something as small as a 1 character edit.

Question:

Is performing a trivial edit to remove a post from the review queue considered "fair game", or is this behavior frowned upon?

Answer 1

Personal thoughts

Only yesterday, I discovered similar behaviour after I edited an answer in the Low Quality Posts queue. At first, I was surprised to find that the review was immediately marked as completed. I would have expected it to remain in the queue and to be subsequently judged on its newer merits. After further consideration, I figured this behaviour makes sense as the primary function of the Low Quality Posts is to

Identify, then improve or delete low-quality posts

However, I don’t think this behaviour make sense in the Close Votes queue. It doesn’t seem useful that editing a post acts like a super-Leave Open vote that over-rules all the previous votes to close and immediately de-queues the question. The linked Stack Exchange Meta answer seems to imply that previously cast Close votes stay in place if the question is subsequently re-nominated for closure (so the situation is not so bad).

As you mention, this behaviour is likely based on the assumption that an edit sufficiently improves the quality of the post so that it no longer needs to be closed. In my experience, a substantial number of question edits don’t improve the quality enough to resolve the reason(s) for the close vote(s). Having said that, I’ve found that the quality of the edits on this site to be far better than on Stack Overflow.

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Answer

To answer your question, I’d consider it an abuse of the system to game it by making trivial edits for the purpose of removing questions from the Close Votes queue.